Key Take-Aways
- The bad news: cyber attacks on small and medium-sized businesses are becoming more frequent. The good news: cyber risks are business risks that SMBs can mitigate.
- Cybersecurity is increasingly required by regulators and business partners. This makes security awareness training a vital part of a comprehensive security strategy that includes technical and organizational measures.
- While security awareness training cannot eliminate all security incidents, it can reduce the risk of human error – a major source of incidents.
- An investment in security awareness training is like getting insurance: both aim to protect your organization. Training prevents damage, while insurance deals with damage.
- Empower staff to increase your organization’s resilience with security awareness training. Ensure the training is quick, engaging, and ongoing. Integrate it into daily work routines and tools to build good cybersecurity habits.
- We suggest checking out the egghead digital Assistant for Security Awareness as your training solution.
Keep Your Business in Business
We understand. As small business owners ourselves, we know how anything outside the core business can feel like a distraction. Yet, what truly holds a business back is an interruption.
Imagine if you couldn’t access your computer systems or data. It could lead to an existential threat. Unfortunately, many companies have already gone bankrupt after cyber attacks (e.g. Bicycle manufacturer Prophete, KNP Logistics, Financial services company Travelex, Cloud Nordic, window manufacturer Swiss Windows).
That’s why prevention is necessary. One key element of required measures: Cybersecurity awareness training. It can help your small business withstand cyber risks.
Cyber Risks are Part of Doing Business
As a small business, you interact daily with your team, customers, potential customers, vendors, government agencies, and many other stakeholders. Organizations don’t operate in bubbles.
To build and maintain these relationships, digital communication channels are essential. We can’t avoid using the internet or email; it’s a business necessity to stay connected and reachable.
While these tools are useful, they leave your business exposed and vulnerable. That’s because malicious actors also use these channels for their fraud attempts.
As long as humans use computers and apps, we are targets because every good hacker knows it’s easier to hack humans than systems. This fact is underscored by the FBI Internet Crime Report, which states that fraud attempts via email (phishing) are the top crime type (Source).
In other words, cyber risks are unavoidable. The good news is that it’s a risk you can do something about.
Risks for SMBs Are Increasing
- Two recent findings:
Reasons for this Development
One of the major reasons is the limited resources that SMBs possess. Unlike enterprises, they typically don’t have the time, people, or money to invest in their cybersecurity measures.
Since the pandemic, larger organizations have increased their risk awareness and made significant efforts to upgrade their resilience (source).
Today, enterprises have sophisticated security measures in place, whereas small businesses do not. According to Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union, these lower cyber defenses have increasingly made small and medium-sized businesses a target (source).
SMEs are not only targets themselves. They also serve as entry points for larger supply chain attacks aimed at hacking into their larger customers’ systems (source).
Last but not least, underdeveloped risk awareness and culture often pose a significant danger. Avoid falling into the following traps.
5 Common Misconceptions Among SMBs About Cyber Security Awareness Training
Did you know that only 37% of small business owners are concerned that their business will fall victim to a cyber attack within the next 12 months (source).
Among the remaining two-thirds, the following misconceptions are common.
“There’s Nothing to Steal From Us”
This is a dangerous misconception. All data has value and can be exploited in unexpected ways. Even if you don’t store financial information, personal data can be used for identity theft or as a gateway to larger targets. Even amounts that might seem small to you are worth much more in other parts of the world. Everyone has something that can be turned into something valuable for someone else.
“It’s a Tech Problem that IT Can Fix with Tech”
For a typical manager, IT should run smoothly and cost as little as possible. It’s considered a cost center because it doesn’t contribute much to the business’s bottom line. Because IT systems are involved, cybersecurity is often perceived as something IT can fix with technical measures.
However, a cybersecurity incident can cause significant damage to a business as a whole. This makes it a topic of risk management for which the company’s leadership is responsible rather than just IT management.
Delegating cybersecurity solely to IT can lead to an overreliance on technical measures and a false sense of security. Staff might assume that IT has everything covered or will fix issues when they arise (source). This way, individuals aren’t prepared to take responsibility and play their role.
Cybersecurity is a multi-faceted discipline involving people, processes, and technology. It’s a team sport.
“We’ll Never Fall for a Scam”
There are cybersecurity professionals who claim they could get anyone to click on a malicious link or open an attachment. Numerous public cases show that even the most tech-savvy employees can be fooled by sophisticated phishing attempts.
With the help of AI, it’s easier than ever to fake someone’s appearance on audio or video. The abundance of data available on the internet provides ample material for highly customized attacks.
Regular training and testing are essential, especially as crime patterns evolve.
“It’s just a Compliance Topic”
While compliance requirements often mandate security training, it’s just a baseline. The goal should be to create a security-conscious culture that goes beyond merely ticking the box. The focus should be on genuinely improving security behaviors so that employees act correctly when it matters.
“Nobody Likes It”
Conducting security awareness training is one thing; how you do it is another. Indeed, training can sometimes be too technical, irrelevant, long, or boring. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Let’s dive into how to conduct security awareness training for small businesses efficiently and effectively.
How to do Cyber Security Awareness Training for Small Businesses
When implementing cybersecurity awareness training, remember that it’s not an IT course. Security awareness training is similar to media literacy, which involves understanding various communication channels. When you watch a movie, you only need to know that a background or object might be created by a computer. You don’t need to know how to use a greenscreen or animation program.
Remember the pandemic? Sneezing into your elbow became natural, even though it was rare before COVID-19. You didn’t need to study biology or medicine to adopt this habit; you just needed to know why it was beneficial for you and your environment.
In the same way, your employees don’t need to become IT experts. They just need to understand the basic principles of cybersecurity and recognize potential threats. Here are some key steps to effectively conduct cybersecurity awareness training for your small business
Focus on the Essential Risks
Generally speaking, security awareness training for small businesses should include as much as needed but as little as possible. It should address the major risks without any fluff. Read more about required and optional security awareness training topics.
Get Expert Knowledge you can Customize
The content you share should be based on research and experience to ensure it is trustworthy and up-to-date. However, since every business is different, you might want to customize the security awareness training content to fit your needs. With egghead, the digital assistant for security awareness, you get ready-made content that you can customize with AI.
Keep it as Short as Possible
The staff is busy. Who can afford to be away from their main duties for hours or even days to learn about cyber risks? Cybersecurity awareness training for small businesses needs to be as short as possible, delivering key information in just a few minutes.
Make it Relevant and Engaging
To show staff what’s in it for them, position security awareness training differently: it’s not just something they do for work, but a skill that helps them in their private lives when surfing the web and using apps. This adds relevance.
To further increase it, keep the content simple. Make it interactive and relatable with real-life examples. Sprinkle in some humor to make it more fun. When you use eggheads for your security awareness training, the AI even delivers personalized feedback to participants based on their responses.
Keep Security Top of Mind Year-Round
While you might have annual security awareness training in place, it rarely leads to sustainable behavior change. There are two major reasons for this. First, human brains are not designed to absorb too much information at once. Second, people forget about 90% of what they hear within a week. That’s why regular reinforcement and reminders are essential to maintain vigilance (read more about refresher training in general).
As cyber-attack patterns constantly evolve, security awareness training needs to keep pace. Or as Salesforce Co-CEO Marc Benioff put it:
“There’s no finish line when it comes to security and social engineering”
Weave Training Seamlessly into Work
You likely already have various internal communication channels. Avoid getting a new app, intranet site or other standalone solution that ends up as a new silo. Instead, reach and engage staff where they already are with an integrated solution like the egghead, a digital assistant for security awareness.
It’s a Microsoft Teams app that turns your central hub of communication and collaboration into a training tool. By reducing barriers, you create a seamless and convenient experience that increases engagement.
Just-in-Time Support
Regardless of how engaged and motivated your team is, they might forget some things from training. Training often involves learning information that isn’t immediately needed, so it gets forgotten.
A digital assistant like the egghead not only shares helpful knowledge proactively but is also there when staff need quick answers to things they already learned. How long should a password be? Am I allowed to use a certain web service?
The egghead answers these questions based on previous training content or documents you add to the knowledge base, such as guidelines or policies. This makes security awareness training a two-way experience.
Is Cyber Security Awareness Training worth it for SMBs?
Things can go wrong, and some say they will. To understand the return on investment for security awareness training, let’s consider what’s at risk.
When a security incident or data loss occurs, the following results are possible:
- lost income because the business can’t operate,
- costs to get systems running again,
- legal fees if taken to court, and
- damage to the company’s reputation. This can hurt the trust of existing customers and deter potential new ones.
The average costs of such incidents can range from tens of thousands to millions of dollars, and in some cases, it can even lead to the closure of the business (see above).
The stakes are high.
However, cybersecurity awareness training can’t guarantee that these scenarios will never happen. Its purpose is to reduce their likelihood. When you compare the costly damages an incident can cause, the investment in cybersecurity awareness training for small businesses is minor.
Simply put: it’s worth it.
In addition to the financial perspective, cybersecurity is increasingly becoming a duty of care (source: Swiss Cyber Security). It shows confidence and trustworthiness to business partners, who expect you to handle their data with confidentiality and not be the weakest link in their supply chain.
On top, there is a regulatory dimension. For example, the GDPR as well as the Swiss DAP require that data security is guaranteed (source). In Europe, if your company falls under the NIS2 directive, you are required to implement rigorous security measures (source).
To sum it up: cyber security awareness training for small businesses is worthwhile. It’s like an insurance that aims to protect your business.
Please explore our solution for cyber security awareness training and get in touch with us.